


the cities which we've slept in

by siddals



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Eventual Threesomes, F/M, Ghost Shenanigans, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-06 19:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siddals/pseuds/siddals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Courfeyrac finds himself neither quite dead nor alive after the barricade. He seeks shelter with the only friend who remains to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the cities which we've slept in

Courfeyrac woke in the Musain lying in a line of bodies.

He was on his side, facing Combeferre who was unmistakably dead, blood on his forehead and his glasses slightly askew, his eyes open, a little startled. Courfeyrac thought to shout at first, thinking it somehow the right reaction but no sound seemed to come out of him. He moved out of the way in a kind of half-horror to avoid touching Combeferre and bumped on his other side into a shape that upon a moment of inspection was revealed to be Joly, cold and stiff. He rose, recoiling from the bodies and realized there were a line of them, put in almost military order.

It was a mistake, of course, but he imagined he must have been gravely injured to be placed in a line of dead and yet he seemed unharmed, not even bloody, much as he had been before he arrived at the barricade. The others were covered in blood and bruises, their eyes startled and holes in their bodies. He was clean, separate, hardly like them.

He staggered backward and it was then that he saw his own body.

He seemed to have left himself lying on the ground, stepped out of the other Courfeyrac and remained whole. The Courfeyrac who was on the ground was full of bullets, one in the middle of his forehead and at least one in his chest. His eyes were open, blank, staring at nothing in particular. Courfeyrac in the body he inhabited (was it a body? did he have one?) seemed to be exactly as he was before, dressed in the clothes he had come to the barricade in, entirely unharmed. He shut his eyes for a moment. It wasn’t right, of course. He’d known he might die, going to the barricades, they had all known that, but it was something else, standing here looking at his body on the floor, along with Joly’s and Combeferre’s. He could hardly remember anything before that, he’d remembered going to the barricades, of course and the beginning of it, but everything after seemed faint, hazy, hard to remember. There had been shooting. He remembered that.

It had fallen, hadn’t it? They had lost. He remembered that too.

Most of the bodies seemed to be people he didn’t know, or barely knew. The nine of them had hardly been the only people there and Combeferre and Joly were the only faces he knew (then again, there were some with blood on their faces, hardly recognizable). He thought to look for the others for a moment, thought to look for Enjolras but if so many of them had fallen, Enjolras couldn’t be alive, could he? The nine of them, here. No, the nine of them was wrong, wasn’t it? Marius had been there too. Courfeyrac hadn’t expected it but he’d been thrilled, at the time, been delighted he’d finally decided to join. Marius had not even cared for revolution, seemed more caught up in his own thoughts and long disappearances. He had not been like them (he’d only come to the cafe because Courfeyrac had brought him here, he realized with a sort of sick feeling). And now he must be dead too.

He wanted to be sick.

He didn’t stay in the cafe or bother looking through the other bodies. They seemed to be staring at him, taunting him, their eyes open and their wounds gaping. The streets of Paris seemed much the same, people talking and laughing, carriages going past, street urchins, women walking arm in arm and laughing.

You fool, something in him said, did you think your death would change anything?

He felt a rough bump against him and found that a young man, around his own age, had walked through the space where he stood. It should have been more jarring that it was, really, but it seemed more like being jostled than anything else, perfectly ordinary, like something he should have been familiar with. But when he looked up, Courfeyrac realized the man must have passed through him entirely.

He wasn’t alive.

It seemed inconceivable to him. He felt alive. He did not feel like a waif or a ghost. His body seemed perfectly solid, as substantial as it had been, but people on the street could pass through him and as he looked around, he saw that nobody looked up as he passed, that they did not seem to see him at all.

He began to shout, simply to see if anyone would notice but the street seemed to continue as it had before, entirely indifferent and he quieted, feeling foolish.

He was dead. He was twenty-one years old, he was dead and he had died for nothing.

Courfeyrac had never been in life much of a doubter. He was not sure how exactly he had gone from something of a careless libertine of a first-year law student to a revolutionary but it hadn’t been something he’d given much to. He’d always been radical, even in school, more outspoken than his peers. He’d argued with his father over politics at fifteen at the dinner-table and he’d been offered indulgent smiles. In the law-school, he’d met others like him, finally met Combeferre who introduced him to Enjolras and all the talk of barricades and revolution, if occasionally a little more frightening than he would admit, seemed only natural.

And now he was dead and he was not quite sure how it had happened.

 

Being a ghost did not exactly come naturally to Courfeyrac. He wasn’t suited for it. He’d never done well with being alone, had always needed people around him.

Perhaps for the first time, he was entirely without friends.

He had friends before meeting the group of men he had died with, of course, but he'd fallen out of touch with most of them as he became more radical and began to make most of them uncomfortable. There were women, of course, but he doubted that even if they could see him, that most of them would want to. He'd been haphazard in his affections at best and while those of his friends that he’d slept with had largely understood that, he worried that if he appeared to any of his former mistresses he’d come away with a slap in the face. He did make something of a halfhearted attempt to visit his home, not knowing if he particularly wanted his parents or siblings to be able to see him, but they couldn't and so it was no matter. The De Courfeyrac family (he himself had been the only one to make a real attempt to shake off the participle) had never approved of his political tendencies but they had, it seemed, managed to have his body identified and buried quietly in the family plot. It seemed a little wrong to be brought, even in death, back to the family fold (his grave read Roland De Courfeyrac, a name that had always made him cringe when spelled out in full) but he had to concede it was something of a relief to at least know he was remembered.

He sought out his friends’ graves, too, not knowing what else to do. It occurred to him, of course, that he might be there forever, stuck in the city without being seen, but it wasn’t something he let himself dwell on. Combeferre’s father had him buried, it seemed, took him away somewhere in the country like Courfeyrac’s own parents. He’d never been able to find out what became of Enjolras. He brought flowers to Jehan’s grave, becoming more sentimental than he was really accustomed to, but he assumed Jehan would have liked that. The others scattered across the country, all over. He assumed Feuilly, at least, had ended up in the mass graves in Paris (it angered him, to think of their bodies thrown away like garbage, but what could he do?). He wasn’t sure of any of the others.

 

Courfeyrac tried to keep up a routine of going through Paris. He had found, to his surprise, that he was not entirely invisible. He nearly started, once, when an old man rather heatedly told him to get out of the way when he was trying to get a carriage and he had to reluctantly tell several gamins that he had no money to offer them (which was true, he had come to the barricade empty-handed). He had come to thirst for these interactions, however rare, enjoyed being recognized and spoken to, became almost a parody of his living self in response, laughing too loudly. A year ago, he would never have been grateful for a simple sentence offered his way but he’d become hungry for contact when deprived of it. He never went to the Musain but he went everywhere else, wandered, hardly seemed to know where he was most of the time. He tried to keep up a routine of some sort, did not allow himself to stay in place, did not allow himself to mope. Sometimes he would speak to people on the street, as many as he could, to see which ones would respond. Sometimes there would be one a day and sometimes there would be nobody and in any case, the talking never lasted long.

It was about two months after his own death that Courfeyrac realized Marius was alive.

He found out by accident. He had sought out Marius’ grave, along with the others, but had come up with nothing. He knew, of course, that Marius had argued with his grandfather and he wasn’t sure if the old man was callous enough to let his grandson rot in a mass grave. It troubled him. The truth was, he felt responsible for Marius. Without them, he’d hardly held any stake in revolution at all. Courfeyrac had picked him up off the street like a stray and brought him to them and now he was dead. He should have left him alone. He should have known when to leave well enough alone.

It was late summer, then, and Courfeyrac was standing on a street corner. Nobody had spoken to him for a few days now and he was attempting not to find it demoralizing, though he seemed to fail at that more and more the longer time stretched between anyone seeming to see or notice him.

“So he’s going to live, then?” 

Two old men had exited one of the buildings on the side of the street and seemed to be waiting for a carriage. They both walked with sticks and were rather bent, though one seemed more animated than the other. Courfeyrac felt a sudden flash of resentment towards the both of them, that they had the nerve to be alive, and at their age too.

“They seem to think so. It was uncertain for a time, of course but it seems it’ll clear up. Foolish boy. To think--ready to die at twenty-one.”

“It’s no age,” the other agreed, shaking his head.

Courfeyrac glared in their direction. It wasn’t that he disagreed, or thought twenty-one was, in fact, a good age to die but the two of them in their tall hats with their bent figures talking about it this way brought up the bile in him and he would have been happy to spit at them.

“Children are ungrateful things!” lamented the first man, “but I suppose I don’t need to tell you that. He’s just like his mother. She was willful too, with that brigand of hers. Never got herself shot, but boys are worse, I suppose.”

The other man shook his head.

“Terrible business. Terrible.”

Courfeyrac had almost decided he’d heard enough of this but the mention of being shot held him, made him curious and he lingered a moment, knowing he should go.

“It should reign him at least, if he’s wise enough to know what he nearly did. No more wandering off refusing money.”

Courfeyrac paused, hardly moving. Before, he had been half-listening, now it seemed there was nobody else on the street.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” the other man agreed, “Your Marius will be man enough after this, if he’s got any sense in him at all. There’s only so much foolishness these boys have in them.”

Courfeyrac heard almost nothing they said after.

He realized he had never known for certain of Marius’ death, only assumed that he had fallen along with the others, that he had never been able to find a grave or locate a body. It was tremendous relief to know he was still alive and the guilt he felt for him over the last few months dissipated. He hadn’t led Marius to his death. Marius was alive.

He knew there was only a slim chance he would be able to see him, of course, but Courfeyrac wanted to visit him in any case. It had been so long since he had seen anyone he could call a friend and if Marius was ill, it seemed only right to look in on him.

He located the Gillenormand house.

Despite his initial assumptions, he couldn't walk through walls or doors and death hadn’t seemed to grant him any especial power with locks. He had to wait outside for the doctor’s entrance but then he passed with no trouble, inside. The Gillenormand house was much like the one Courfeyrac had grown up in, with its cavernous main hall and rushing servants, but it seemed colder, emptier, graver.

Marius had always been thin and pale, but now he was half-dead, skinnier than before, looking up at Courfeyrac from the bed with slightly dazed eyes. He could see him, Courfeyrac was sure of it and that wasn’t surprising, really, when he came to think of it. In the months since he’d been dead, he’d hardly sorted out any sort of pattern as to why some people could see him and some couldn’t, but Marius was so barely alive himself, had so nearly died with them, that he could barely imagine him not seeing a ghost. It seemed strange, Courfeyrac thought, that he the ghost was exactly the same as he had been, hardy and solid while Marius, who was alive at least in the loosest sense, seemed hardly there, barely tethered to his body.

It seemed wrong to greet him as brashly as he would have before but Courfeyrac was unsure of what to offer in place, whether to attempt to explain himself or ask for his friendship again or wish him some kind of luck. Marius studied him for a moment with wide, childlike eyes and then spoke before he had the chance to.

“Oh, god.” His voice was weak, seeming to talk to himself more than Courfeyrac. “Please go away.”

“No, please, Marius, let me explain--”

He was afraid of him and Courfeyrac felt a sudden stab of guilt for not considering this when he let himself in. It was only natural, of course, to be afraid of ghosts, particularly in Marius’ weakened condition and he had no intention of coming to frighten him.

“Just go away, just leave me. I don’t want to see you.” It came out almost in a wail.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he said, very gently, hoping to soothe him.

“You’re not real.”

“I’m real, I am, promise I am. I woke up in the Musain with all the bodies around me and since then I’ve been doing nothing, really, I don’t know why I’m still here. The others are dead, but you knew that. They’re gone too, I haven’t seen a trace of them even like this, it’s only me here. I thought you were dead too, I was so glad when I learned you weren’t. You weren’t supposed to die with us, it wasn’t fair for you to, I should have sent you away from the barricades when I saw you but I thought then that we could win, I suppose. I was just happy to have people on our side. I didn’t think.”

Marius shook his head, seeming to barely hear him.

“No. No. You’re not real. Go away.”

“I am! I promise!”

“Oh god, I’m going mad. I am. I’m going mad.”

Courfeyrac half-thought to offer more weak protestation but Marius was clearly not hearing him. He hadn’t come there with the intention of unsettling him or frightening him or convincing him he was mad and if that was all he could accomplish, he certainly didn’t see the point in staying. He half-considered lingering, trying to convince him further. Marius was, after all, the first person to see him who he’d known in life and he was almost inclined to beg so that he wouldn’t be forced back to an existence of being silent and unrecognized.

“Just go,” Marius said, sounding plaintive.

He went.


End file.
